Search results matching tags 'Conferences', 'SQLServer', and 'SQL Server'http://sqlblog.com/search/SearchResults.aspx?o=DateDescending&tag=Conferences,SQLServer,SQL+Server&orTags=0Search results matching tags 'Conferences', 'SQLServer', and 'SQL Server'en-USCommunityServer 2.1 SP2 (Build: 61129.1)A SQL Saturday in Cambridge – Buck Woody’s Ragtime Database Workshophttp://sqlblog.com/blogs/buck_woody/archive/2012/07/30/a-sql-saturday-in-cambridge-buck-woody-s-ragtime-database-workshop.aspxMon, 30 Jul 2012 20:49:00 GMT21093a07-8b3d-42db-8cbf-3350fcbf5496:44506BuckWoody<p><img style="margin:0px 12px 0px 0px;border:0px currentcolor;float:left;display:inline;background-image:none;" border="0" align="left" src="http://s0.geograph.org.uk/geophotos/03/03/79/3037997_4fbc532b.jpg" width="143" height="191" />The SQL Server community is really engaged. They are an active bunch on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, they help each other on forums, they attend conferences. But that isn&rsquo;t enough interaction &ndash; the community started a grass-roots effort to hold local conferences on a Saturday. Free conferences. Odds are there&rsquo;s one near you&hellip; <a href="http://www.sqlsaturday.com/default.aspx">http://www.sqlsaturday.com/default.aspx</a> &hellip; and if not, you can start one.</p>
<p>Sessions at SQL Saturdays are all over the map, and there&rsquo;s something for (almost) everyone, from Business Intelligence to Database Administration and Development. Some of these events have &ldquo;training days&rdquo; associated with them &ndash; longer, more in-depth training that has a fee. I&rsquo;ve taught quite a few of these, and of course I&rsquo;ve done my share of other presentations at the events as well.</p>
<p>I&rsquo;m honored to be presenting at the Cambridge, UK SQL Saturday this year (<a href="http://www.sqlsaturday.com/162/eventhome.aspx">http://www.sqlsaturday.com/162/eventhome.aspx</a>) in September. For one thing, I used to live near there and plan to take the family with me to show them my old stomping grounds. For another, I&rsquo;m excited about the sessions I get to present.</p>
<h1>The Training Day</h1>
<p>Friday I&rsquo;ll be leading one of those training days &ndash; and I&rsquo;ll be delivering a very important workshop, where I&rsquo;ll cover SQL Server &ndash; all of it. OK, maybe not *all* of it, and maybe you won&rsquo;t be a complete PhD after the class, but we&rsquo;ll do a complete immersion in learning SQL Server as a product from the ground up. It&rsquo;s a workshop format, so no sitting and listening to someone droning on and on for hours. You&rsquo;ll be asked to bring a laptop, and do actual work on the product from the first few minutes of the 8-hour day to the last of the workshop. You&rsquo;ll be jumping in from the very start, and in deep until the end of the day.</p>
<p><img style="float:right;display:inline;" align="right" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-puPgE6XkWD0/UAQG0UcefOI/AAAAAAAAAU4/ozJoS9m_vxQ/s320/bucks+ragtimescale.jpg" />&nbsp;</p>
<p>But wait &ndash; this is kind of a &ldquo;beginner&rdquo; thing, isn&rsquo;t it? Shouldn&rsquo;t I be doing something on the internals of the locking mechanism of the hashing system in memory on x64 architectures, with complete code diagrams? Shouldn&rsquo;t you be able to snatch the T-SQL pebble from the master&rsquo;s hand when you&rsquo;re done, or be able to shoot the wings off of an XML fly when you&rsquo;re done?</p>
<p><strong>No.</strong></p>
<p>We <em>need</em> this kind of session. For one thing, you can get that depth in other sessions. For another, we need to have a place for someone that wants to learn SQL Server but doesn&rsquo;t have a lot of time to do that. We need something relatively inexpensive that a boss can send a developer, administrator or new employee to learn how to take over the SQL Server, or augment the DBA team. We need a place where good habits are formed, and where someone can branch out into a new part of technology, into one of the best places in tech to be &ndash; data.</p>
<p>After you&rsquo;re done with this session, stick around for Saturday &ndash; now all those presentations will make more sense. And you&rsquo;ll be able to network with a lot of folks that already do what you learn about on Friday, and who knows &ndash; find out where to look for work in this amazing career field.</p>
<h1>What will you learn?</h1>
<p>You&rsquo;ll start with knowing that SQL Server is a database product by Microsoft. That&rsquo;s all the pre-requisite you need, other than being the technology industry. From there we&rsquo;ll cover:</p>
<ul>
<li><span style="color:#000000;"><span style="font-family:'Arial','sans-serif';font-size:9pt;">The Data Professional Career </span></span></li>
<li><span style="color:#000000;"><span style="font-family:'Arial','sans-serif';font-size:9pt;">Installing, setting up and configuring the right Edition of SQL Server for the job (including SQL Azure)<o:p></o:p></span></span></li>
<li><span style="color:#000000;"><span style="font-family:'Arial','sans-serif';font-size:9pt;">Database engine fundamentals &ndash; How does the engine work, what are the components, what can you configure and tune<o:p></o:p></span></span></li>
<li><span style="color:#000000;"><span style="font-family:'Arial','sans-serif';font-size:9pt;">Transactions, Locking and Blocking<o:p></o:p></span></span></li>
<li><span style="color:#000000;"><span style="font-family:'Arial','sans-serif';font-size:9pt;">Creating and managing databases<o:p></o:p></span></span></li>
<li><span style="color:#000000;"><span style="font-family:'Arial','sans-serif';font-size:9pt;">Database options and their impact<o:p></o:p></span></span></li>
<li><span style="color:#000000;"><span style="font-family:'Arial','sans-serif';font-size:9pt;">Database Objects including Tables, Views, Stored Procedures, Functions and more<o:p></o:p></span></span></li>
<li><span style="color:#000000;"><span style="font-family:'Arial','sans-serif';font-size:9pt;">General maintenance including backups and recovery<o:p></o:p></span></span></li>
<li><span style="color:#000000;"><span style="font-family:'Arial','sans-serif';font-size:9pt;">Security fundamentals including users, roles, and object security<o:p></o:p></span></span></li>
<li><span style="color:#000000;"><span style="font-family:'Arial','sans-serif';font-size:9pt;">Performance tuning fundamentals including indexes and query research tools<o:p></o:p></span></span></li>
<li><span style="color:#000000;"><span style="font-family:'Arial','sans-serif';font-size:9pt;">Multiple resources to help you get to the next level<o:p></o:p></span></span></li>
</ul>
<p>&nbsp;In 8-hours. Come ready to learn. You&rsquo;ll need a laptop, and complete focus for a few hours. You&rsquo;ll leave with the ability to manage and work with a SQL Server system &ndash; and you&rsquo;ll learn what to do next.</p>
<h1>Who should go?</h1>
<p>If you&rsquo;re new to Relational Database Management Systems (RDBMS&rsquo;s) but not technology, and you&rsquo;re looking to expand your technical reach, coming from another platform (to be sure, there will be some repeat info here), want to explore a new tech career area, want to learn more about developing against an RDBMS or know someone who does.</p>
<p>The registration for the training day is here: <a href="https://www.regonline.co.uk/?eventID=1120017&amp;rTypeID=242030">https://www.regonline.co.uk/?eventID=1120017&amp;rTypeID=242030</a>&nbsp;</p>
<h1>What else are you doing whilst (I love saying whilst) there?</h1>
<p>I&rsquo;m also pleased to be providing the keynote on Saturday. (I can&rsquo;t wait to see what I&rsquo;m going to say), as well as two other sessions &ndash; more on those soon. My daughter wants to be a Zoologist, so while we&rsquo;re there we&rsquo;ll be visiting the Zoology museum at one of the colleges, I&rsquo;ll probably eat too much and potentially go punting. I&rsquo;ll also mingle with you, my SQL Family, and we&rsquo;ll just generally have a good time.</p>
<p>If you&rsquo;re not busy in September, and even if you are, make plans to come check all this out. It promises to be awesome. (Americans think everything is awesome)</p>
<p>See you there.</p>Big Data and the Cloud - More Hype or a Real Workload?http://sqlblog.com/blogs/buck_woody/archive/2011/10/18/big-data-and-the-cloud-more-hype-or-a-real-workload.aspxTue, 18 Oct 2011 13:57:36 GMT21093a07-8b3d-42db-8cbf-3350fcbf5496:39156BuckWoody<p>Last week Microsoft announced several new offerings for “Big Data” - and since I’m a stickler for definitions, I wanted to make sure I understood what that really means. What is “Big Data”? What size hard drive is that? After all, my laptop has 1TB of storage - is my laptop “Big Data”?</p> <p>There are actually a few definitions for this term, most notably those involving the <a href="http://nosql.mypopescu.com/post/9621746531/a-definition-of-big-data" target="_blank">“Four V’s” Volume, Velocity, Variety and Variability</a>. Others <a href="http://nosql.mypopescu.com/post/10120087314/big-data-and-the-4-vs-volume-velocity-variety" target="_blank">disagree with this</a> definition. I tend to try and get things into their simplest form, so I’m using this definition for myself:</p> <p align="center"><font color="#c0504d" size="3">Big data is defined as a <em>large set </em>of <em>computationally expensive </em>data that is <em>worked on simultaneously</em>.</font> </p> <p>Let me flesh that out a&#160; little. To be sure, “Big Data” has a larger size than say a few megabytes. The reason this is important is that it takes special hardware to be able to move large sets of data around, store it, process it and so on. (<font color="#c0504d">large set</font>)</p> <p>If you store a LOT of data, but only use a small portion of it at a time, that really isn’t super-hard to do. It’s mainly a storage issue at that point. But, if you do need to work with a large portion of the data at one time, then the memory, CPU and transfer components of the system have to adapt to be responsive - new ways to work with that data (game theory, knot-algorithms, map-reduce, etc.) need to be brought into play. (<font color="#c0504d">computationally expensive</font>)</p> <p>Once that data is loaded into the processing area (memory or whatever other mechanism is used) it must be worked on in parallel to come back in a reasonable time. You have two options here - you can scale the system up with more internal hardware (CPU’s, memory and so on) or you can scale it out to have multiple systems work on it at the same time using paradigms such as map/reduce and so on. Actually, when you lay this out in an architecture diagram, scale up or out doesn’t actually change the logical structure of the process - in scale out the network becomes the bus, and the nodes become more RAM and computing power. Of course, there are changes in code for how you stitch the workload back together. (<font color="#c0504d">worked on simultaneously</font>)</p> <p>So back to the original question. Is Big Data, as I have defined it here, a workload for Windows and SQL Azure? Absolutely! In fact, it’s probably one of the main workloads, and I believe it represents the latest, and perhaps also the earliest frontier of computing. Jim <a href="http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/gray/" target="_blank">Gray, a former researcher here at Microsoft and a hero of mine, was working on this very topic.</a> I believe as he did - all computing is simply an interface over data. </p> <p>Microsoft has multiple offerings on the topic of Big Data. In posts that follow from myself and my co-workers, we’ll explore when and where you use each one. Whether you are a data professional or a developer, this is the new frontier - <a href="http://www.straightpathsql.com/archives/2011/10/microsoft-loves-your-big-data/" target="_blank">don’t wait to educate yourself</a> on how to leverage Big Data for your organization. </p> <p><strong>Hadoop on Windows Azure and SQL Server&#160; </strong>- Microsoft’s <a href="http://www.hortonworks.com/the-whys-behind-the-microsoft-and-hortonworks-partnership/" target="_blank">partnership to include Hadoop workloads on Windows Azure</a> and <a href="http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=27584" target="_blank">SQL Server/Parallel Data Warehouse (PDW)</a></p> <p><strong>LINQ to HPC </strong>- Microsoft’s High-Performance Computing SKU of <a href="http://blogs.technet.com/b/windowshpc/archive/2011/05/20/dryad-becomes-linq-to-hpc.aspx" target="_blank">HPC is now in Azure</a></p> <p><strong>Windows Azure Table Storage </strong>- A <a href="http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/hh508997.aspx" target="_blank">key/value pair type storage with full partitioning</a> that is immediately consistent, able to handle huge loads of data and works with any REST-compatible language</p> <p>&#160;<strong>Other offerings </strong>- Including the new <a href="http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sqlazurelabs/default.aspx" target="_blank">Data Explorer</a>, <a href="http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/news/headlines/daytona-071811.aspx" target="_blank">Project Daytona (with a Big Data Toolkit for Scientists and researchers)</a>, <a href="http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/en/us/future-editions/SQL-Server-2012-breakthrough-insight.aspx" target="_blank">Power View</a> and more. </p> <p>The era of Big Data is here. And you can use Windows and SQL Azure to bring it to your organization. </p>